


lodestar

by Zampano



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Gore, Implied Kyloke if you squint, Implied Kylux, M/M, body horror too possibly, explicit gore y'all, eyeball gore, lots of implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 08:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5914624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zampano/pseuds/Zampano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux finds it hard to divert his eyes from the Supreme Leader, yet his formidable and pitted face is one he can only vaguely discern, the fall of his robes the featureless cascade of the spires of Geonosis. Snoke is more a presence than a being, almost seemingly as intangible as the Force itself.</p><p>And at his feet kneels Kylo Ren, a mass of shaded black in the cimmerian scene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lodestar

It is an echoing chamber of black and white negative space, the light streaming in blocks from unseen windows overhead and tinted with ashen dust. Sound travels light and far and returns in these spaces, the footfall of General Hux's boots resounding back to him as though from a stranger even seconds after he has stopped walking.

Hux doesn't have to be Force sensitive to feel the galvanized crackle and burn in the air, the stifling hand of the Dark Side pressing in on him as his eyes adjust to the chamber. It's still all blurred edges and indistinct walls and windows, pillars that stand imposing at the corners of his vision but never allow his focus to linger.

A thrill courses through him when his eyes take in Supreme Leader Snoke, not as though he has just appeared but like his eyes have just been granted permission to see. Snoke absorbs his attention, standing a foot taller than Hux in the flesh, but he feels no less of a presence than his hologram at Starkiller Base. Hux finds it hard to divert his eyes from the Supreme Leader, yet his formidable and pitted face is one he can only vaguely discern, the fall of his robes the featureless cascade of the spires of Geonosis. Snoke is more a presence than a being, almost seemingly as intangible as the Force itself.

And at his feet kneels Kylo Ren, a mass of shaded black in the cimmerian scene. His head is bowed in a presentation of submission General Hux is distantly appeased to be privy to, fingers clenched in loose fists over the gauzy tiles of the chamber. Ren is breathing, and Hux can feel every inhale and exhale of energy; an electric tingle skirting on the edge of his Force-unfamiliar senses.

"You are easily distracted." Snoke's voice is the wind in the trees, the thunderclap of an impending storm. "You see too much you have no reason to see."

"Forgive me, Supreme Leader," says Kylo Ren, and he sounds pitiful. "Mold me to your will, to better do your bidding."

Snoke glides a hand down to tip up Ren by the chin, looking into his face. In profile Ren's newly acquired scar is invisible to Hux, but he knows Snoke is trailing a thumb over the indentation, no doubt still rough and scarred. Snoke slides his hands up over Kylo Ren's eyes, covering them in gesture laced with unforeseen tenderness.

"Do you see?" Snoke questions him.

"Yes," Kylo stammers out, and swallows. Hux feels a stab of scorn at his weakness, but Supreme Leader Snoke appears content.

"What do you see, Kylo Ren?"

"I see you, Master," Ren continues, the rise and fall of his breathing hard and quick. "I see the walls, I see the floor, I see beyond the walls, I see the tuk'ata, I see clearly across the mountains and the ruby sands -- "

Ren stops, as though overcome by his senses. Snoke is patient, willing. "I see the Force, Master. I see it spread like a map. I see your aura blanketing it, I see the Knights behind the door. Visual obstacles have no meaning."

"An accomplishment, Kylo Ren," Snoke tells him, and Hux feels a stab of envy, deep and loathing. "With the destruction of the Luka Sene you have now become one of the galaxy's most accomplished in Force Sight."

"There is nothing but the Force in my observation, Master," Ren tells him, as though a vow of piety. "I can be a more formidable opponent than I ever was."

"You are being trained as my weapon, and a weapon can have no excess," Snoke tells him. Ren waits, lips parted and dark in the sparse light, fingers clenched on his thighs in deference. "You will be honed. You will be shined."

Snoke turns his thumbs inwards in one swift flick of his wrists, and Ren lets out a rattling scream that assaults Hux before the visual of the rivulets of blood bearing down Ren's face imprints on his mind. Hux has always looked down on empathy, but the visceral reaction the sight tugs out of him is deep to the bone; this is much more immediate than the distant, undetailed deaths of millions in stellar nuclear fusion. This is much more startling.

Snoke allows Ren to scream, and Ren is trying his best to remain still and cooperative, hands twitching where they're poised and body shaking like a groundquake. Snoke says nothing of control as he twists his thumbs, gouging under and up Ren's eyeballs, until they're loosened from their sockets and ejected in a curdling display of their startling sphericity, bloodshot and unseeing. Snoke removes his thumbs with a wet sound, and the chamber falls into silence with only Ren's pained hyperventilation slicing through the heavy air. Hux feels his insides churning with a mix of revulsion and yielding to pity.

"What do you see?" Snoke asks Kylo Ren.

"Everything," Ren replies. Snoke delicately grasps the eyeballs at the base of the optical nerve, and twists them off. Hux realizes his own breath is hot against his face, encapsulated in his hand over his mouth. Snoke weighs Kylo Ren's eyeballs in his hands, as though pricing precious jewels. Ren's eyelids are closed and sunken, dark blue bruises already starting to circle his empty orbital cavities.

"I – I see Hux," Ren says, and Hux feels jolted to the scene, like he's no longer a mere onlooker. He can feel Snoke smile more than see it, and when he speaks his blitheness is audible.

"He is here," says Supreme Leader Snoke. "I have allowed him to watch."

Ren does not reply to this, but the shift in his posture oozes a resigned shame that Hux does not miss. Snoke holds the eyes down to Ren's face, and Hux wonders with a manic curiosity if he can see his own severed organs with Force sight.

"Waste not, Master of Ren," Snoke chides him, good-naturedly. Ren stiffens, and then with a submission that feels more machine than man, leans forward to slick his tongue over the eyeballs, licking up the remnants of blood and tears. He opens his mouth, accepting, and Snoke pushes one of the eyeballs against his worried lips before he takes it in with a reverential hunger. Hux fights his gut reaction to retch when Ren chews, blood and vitreous humor bursting in his mouth, before he swallows down the masticated organ.

Snoke urges him, extending his hand with the other eyeball, and Ren reaches out this time to take it in his mouth, drooling spit, blood and fluid onto Snoke's palm. Hux watches as Ren chews down and swallows, the sounds of teeth grinding pulpy flesh burning into his memory.

Supreme Leader Snoke holds out a hand, still sticky with spit. "When you have completed the final phase of your training, you will see only with the Force, hear only with the Force, and speak only into the minds of men with the Force. Your body will be an armor as much as it is a prison. Your consciousness will become the strongest weilder of the Force, all distractions eliminated. You will hear me, and I will be your lodestar to greatness unparalleled in the galaxy through time."

Hux knows Ren senses Snoke's hand, and raises up his head to meet it. Supreme Leader Snoke runs his fingers through the locks of black curls, smoothing back Ren's hair from his face, bringing his swollen, bleeding eye sockets into clarity in the hazy, obscured light of the chamber.

It is equally dark and indistinct when General Hux wakes up in the cold sterility of his bed, and he knows that was not a dream.


End file.
